Paul Begala calls bullshit

In this awesome column on the Huffington Post, Paul Begala calls bullshit on why the so called liberal media lets Republicans get away with things the same journalists falsely accuse Democrats of.

...In a 2000 debate, Al Gore said that during wildfires in Texas he'd met with the director of FEMA. In fact, Vice President Gore had met with the deputy director of FEMA. Although I had been at the meeting as well, I didn't remember it either. But the press, spoon-fed by the Republican smear machine, used the misstatement to damn Gore as a "serial exaggerator."

So I expected the 600 journalists covering the GOP debate at St. Anselm's College to spank Mitt Romney when, in answering the first question of the night -- knowing what you know now, would you have invaded Iraq? -- Romney said that if "Saddam Hussein had opened up his country to IAEA inspectors, and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction...we wouldn't be in the conflict we're in."...

First, Begala calls Romney on that bullshit with a link to a CNN story from 2002 called "Iraq agrees to weapons inspections."

...So for Mitt Romney to say it was Saddam who kicked the inspectors out, well, I thought he'd be crushed for his ignorance -- or his dishonesty. I almost felt sorry for him.

But after the debate, nothing.

I couldn't believe it. I understood why Romney's Republican opponents didn't correct him. They need the public to believe the myth that Saddam wouldn't allow weapons inspectors in. In fact, Bush has repeated this same lie. Republicans want to blur the record, to revise history, so we don't have to confront the fact that if Mr. Bush had given the weapons inspectors more time to do their job, they would have concluded Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. No weapons, no threat. No threat, no war.

But I was -- and am -- stunned at the lack of scrutiny by the media. The New York Times found the space to correct some bit of arcana they believe Romney misstated about Z-visas -- a form of visa that does not exist, incorporated in a bill that will not become law. And yet the Times, like most of its colleagues and competitors, ignored the fact that Romney told a big, fat whopper about why Mr. Bush went to war -- and why tens of thousands of people are now dead...

There you have it. Gore makes a small error while recounting an otherwise accurate memory and is called a liar. Romney actually lies and reporters yawn.

What liberal media?